NEW RESOURCES

RTE: TV news reports from 1980s and 1990s coming online. “Thousands of news reports from the 1980s and 1990s are to be made available for viewing on the RTÉ website. The RTÉ Archives News Collection goes live today, with almost 1,500 news stories filmed between 7 March and 31 December 1985. New material will then be posted to the site daily, covering the period up to 1999. The stories were originally recorded on video and have been digitally preserved by RTÉ Archives with the support of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.”

Library of Congress: New Online: Scary Stories and More. “With Halloween just around the corner, the Library of Congress has released a new web guide to Halloween resources at the Library. It features select materials on the folk customs, fine art, pop culture and literature of Halloween and Día de Muertos, or ‘Day of the Dead,’ observed in Mexico and elsewhere in North America on November 1.”

Notre Dame: Introducing: ImaginePhD! A career exploration tool for humanities & social science grad students . “We are excited to announce the launch of ImaginePhD – a free, online career exploration and planning tool designed specifically for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars in humanities and social sciences…. Developed by experts from over 50 universities as part of the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC), ImaginePhD offers a unique platform that teaches PhDs about popular job sectors, search strategies, and how to transfer skills across settings.” This is a Notre Dame announcement, but the ImaginePhD site is useful for students everywhere. It’s also free.

DigitalNC: Crossroads, newspaper of Belmont Abbey College digitized. “Crossroads, the newspaper of Belmont Abbey College, is now digitized on DigitalNC. Courtesy of our partner Belmont Abbey College, 44 issues are available to browse beginning with the very first off the press in November 1971. This collection spans from 1971-1979 with issues published every other month.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Facebook rolls out new tools for group admins, plus badges and profiles for members. “Facebook today introduced a good handful of new features for groups on Facebook, with a focus on helping admins better manage and grow their online communities, and helping members better connect with one another. The additions, inspired by user feedback, include support for welcome posts, badges, member profiles and other admin-level controls.”

CNET: Instagram gets up close and personal with ‘Superzoom’. “Nothing says funny like a theatrical superzoom. Case in point: Dramatic Chipmunk. In that video, you see the little furry creature quickly turn around and then stare into the camera as it zooms in closer and closer to its face. Now, Instagram is making it easy to record and post videos just like this on the social network. The photo-sharing app rolled out the new feature on Thursday, calling it ‘Superzoom.’ ”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: Microsoft’s new open source tool can scan your website for security and performance headaches. “Microsoft’s Edge browser team has released an open source ‘linting’ tool and a site scanner to help web developers secure their sites and keep up with evolving web standards. According to Microsoft, Sonar improves on available static site scanners by executing website code, while integrating with other scanning services such as Qualys’ SSL certificate configuration testing service SSL Server Test, aXe for testing a site’s accessibility support, the Google-founded AMP Project, and snyk.io, which is Sonar’s scanner for vulnerable JavaScript libraries.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ReviewGeek: PSA: Parents, YouTube Is Littered with Creepy Pseudo “Kid-Friendly” Videos. “The issue recently came to our attention when a friend with small children mentioned that he was increasingly finding very weird videos, on both the general YouTube site and on the YouTube Kids app, while searching for kid-friendly content. What kind of weird? Dozens and dozens of videos that looked otherwise kid-friendly but with popular characters acting violent, getting hurt, or engaging in inappropriate behavior no parent would want their child to emulate.” Kind of surprised these would end up on YouTube Kids.

Politico: How Facebook, Google and Twitter ’embeds’ helped Trump in 2016. “Facebook, Twitter and Google played a far deeper role in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign than has previously been disclosed, with company employees taking on the kind of political strategizing that campaigns typically entrust to their own staff or paid consultants, according to a new study released Thursday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wilderness Society: New bill will direct federal agencies to account for carbon emissions from public lands. “Today, Reps. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), Ted Deutch (D-FL), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Niki Tsongas (D-MA) introduced H.R. 4126 Transparency in Energy Production Act of 2017. The bill would direct the Department of the Interior to track and house an online database that aggregates the production and emissions data from fossil fuel development on public lands.”

MyBroadband: Massive South African data leak – Now over 75 million records at risk. “A leaked database containing the personal details of millions of South Africans may not be the only sensitive information available online. The leaked database backup file – called ‘masterdeeds.sql’ – was stored on the webserver of Jigsaw Holdings and was said to have 60 million records in it. It has now emerged that the company’s database server was also poorly secured.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys.org: Researcher finds temporary social media eases inhibitions but not judgment. “Yeah, it’s temporary, but you still might want to think twice before posting that. That’s the message from new Harvard Business School research that looks at behavior on temporary social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The research, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compiled results from nine studies conducted online and on college campuses exploring what people were comfortable sharing on temporary platforms and how the posts were perceived.” Good morning, Internet…

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